Profile of a Unicorn

November 6, 2013
Business, Startups, Technology
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unicorn

An interesting article on TechCrunch, written by the folks at Cowboy Ventures – they put together a in-depth profile of startups that are now valued at $1B or more, referring to these mythical creatures as “Unicorns”.

Below are some highlights I found interesting.  Be sure to check out the rest of the article here.

Fun Unicorn Facts:

  • There are currently 39 Unicorns
  • Only 0.7% of venture backed companies (from ’03-’10) have grown up to be Unicorns
  • On average four Unicorns were born per year from 2003 -2010
  • It has taken seven plus years on average for these Unicorns to reach a liquidity event and a third of Unicorns are still private
  • There are more consumer oriented Unicorns than enterprise oriented Unicorns
  • BUT enterprise Unicorns have delivered more value per private dollar invested (26x total capital raised vs. 11x for consumer)
  • Average age of a Unicorn founder is 34 and there were on average three co-founders at each Unicorn
  • 90% of founding teams either worked together previously or went to school together
  • 80% of Unicorns had at least one co-founder who had previously founded a company
  • Few companies are the result of a successful pivot; ~90% of companies are still working on their original product vision

unicorn-graph1cunicorn-graph2c

Buffett on Gold + Me on E-readers

October 15, 2013
Business, Investing
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I’m currently reading The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition and while I’m tempted to repeat every little tidbit of wisdom on this blog I’ve thus far been successful at not completely plagiarizing the author’s work.  Below is a fantastic little excerpt on Gold.

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $ 1,750 per ounce— gold’s price as I write this— its value would be $ 9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $ 200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $ 40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $ 1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $ 9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

— Cunningham, Lawrence A.; Buffett, Warren E. (2013-03-01). The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition (Kindle Locations 2516-2522). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

As a side note I’ve whole heartedly adopted the Kindle app as my e-reader of choice (I have an iPad & a MacBook Air).  While I like iBooks I find the books on Amazon to be generally cheaper than iTunes and there are more ways to access your books (Kindle app for ipad, the internet, and a Kindle app for OSX).  Although I’ve heard that Mavericks will have an iBook app when it is released later this year so stay tuned.

 

Quartz: 96.8% of trades placed in the US stock market are cancelled

October 10, 2013
Finance, Investing
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That number is shocking to me.  I for one think high frequency trading is a perversion of our capital markets.  People will argue that it provides liquidity but at what cost?  Read the full article over at Quartz.

“Although the SEC isn’t saying as much, experts think it’s a sign that high-frequency trading are flooding the market with orders, overwhelming the average retail or institutional investor.”

“High frequency trading firms have been known to flood the market with orders, trying to determine the price institutional or retail investors are offering, then cancel 90% of them a split-second later. This can artificially alter the price of a security, netting high-frequency traders profits at the expense of their counterparties. True, those profits are small—often just pennies. But over time, these firms make millions of dollars.”

I like Charle Schwab’s and Walt Bettinger’s solution:

“A penalty on excessive cancellations, rigorous enforcement of rules regarding information access, and a top-to-bottom study of the NYSE’s 40-year-old Market Data System would be good places to start,”

Hemingway’s Idea of Heaven

October 8, 2013
Culture
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An interesting idea of heaven from an interesting man – this is Hemingway’s letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  People just don’t write letters / correspond like they used to!

***

Burguete, Navera.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the / Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both –

Yours,
Ernest

***

Source: Brainpickings

Found via Jack Dorsey

Time to Tame the NSA

September 27, 2013
Politics
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Really great article about the NSA’s overreach by The Guardian: Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights

One of my favorite paragraphs from the piece provides a great teaser:

“We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.”

I keep wishing the defenders of our fourth amendment rights were as loud, as well organized, and as well funded as those that defend our second amendment rights.  I also can’t help but think about the probability of dying from a terrorist attack as compared to say a car accident, heart disease, or gun violence.  It is a minuscule probability at best – so why undermine the constitution over it? (as if there is ever a good reason to undermine the constitution – give me liberty or give me death!)  I get angry thinking of all the men and women that have died defending our constitution and how quickly those that have sworn to defend it subvert it.

For a long recap of how the NSA and America’s broader security apparatus have violated our rights see New NSA Revelations Are Breaking Every Day

If reading isn’t your thing there is a great Frontline episode available online called Top Secret America

Both articles were found via The Big Picture

Henry Ford Quotes

September 16, 2013
Business, Quotes, Technology
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Great list of quotes from Henry Ford.  Go check out the full article 21 Quotes From Henry Ford On Business, Leadership And Life over at Forbes.

  • There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
  • Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
  • Don’t find fault, find a remedy.
  • Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
  • Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.
  • Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
  • Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.
  • Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
  • The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
  • If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’
  • You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
  • If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
  • Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.
  • Vision without execution is just hallucination.
  • There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.
  • A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
  • I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.
  • A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits.  They will be embarrassingly large.
  • You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.
  • Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
  • To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.